On-line learning tools, courses, and methods have been developed from computer-based delivery (CBT) systems, in which learning resources were depicted as being as atoms or Lego® blocks of content that could be put together or organized to create semantic content. Standards bodies have refined the concept of learning resources into a rigorous form and have provided specifications on how to sequence and organize these bits of content into courses and how to package them for delivery as though they were books, training manuals, or other sources of instructional content.
Electronic instructional content (or “e-learning”) for educational, training, infomercial, or entertainment purposes can be delivered to a user through many media (e.g., the Internet, television, playable storage media, such as videotapes, DVDs, CDs, intelligent tutoring systems, and CBT). The instructional content can be delivered to a user in many different forms (e.g., tests, training programs, and interactive media) and is generally referred to herein as a “course.” In general, e-learning courses are suites of electronic learning resources (i.e., pieces of data that are used in an e-learning course) and can be composed of modules and lessons, supported with quizzes, tests and discussions, and can be integrated into educational institution's student information system, into a business's employee training system, or any other system in which learning occurs. The learning resources of an e-learning course can be composed of numerous files of many different formats (e.g., text files, PDF files, multimedia files, including jpeg, mpeg, wave, and MP3 files, HTML, and XML files). The number and complexity of the different learning resources in a course can be high and the relations and interfaces between the different learning resources also can be complex.
After a course is developed, it is often desired to modify the course and to reuse existing learning resources for a new purpose, rather than building a new course for the new purpose from scratch. However, current e-learning resources often do not integrate well into the new context in many cases. Therefore, changes have to be made to the learning resources prior to re-use of the content of the learning resources. For example, to alter the content or layout of a course for use in the modified course it can be necessary to modify a learning resource, to segment a learning resource into smaller parts, or to aggregate parts from different learning resources into a new learning resource.
The task of modifying the electronic content in an e-learning course must cope with the format-dependency of the learning resources, the fact that content generally is stored in multiple discrete files (or documents), the potential loss of information, during the modification process, and explicit semantic relations (e.g., relations or equal values in metadata) and explicit semantic relations (e.g., content relating to similar topics or having didactic dependencies) between different learning resources.
Thus, format-dependency may require a developer to implement the same modification process anew for each document format that is supported in the course, and the process must be adjusted to the features and limitations of the particular format. Furthermore, if content is spread over several related documents, the modification process should handle the multiple documents logically as one single learning resource. When content is spread over several documents in different formats it is difficult to handle the modification process in a generic manner without resorting to re-building the content in each dedicated set of formats.